Susan Sellers Shifting Perspective

August 30, 2023

Susan Sellers

Shifting Perspective

Block Island, RI

By Mary MacGill.
Photography by Susan Paulsen.

MM: What initially inspired you to start 2x4?

SS: I was passionate about design, about how the visual environment and material culture shapes our lives in big and small ways and I still am.

MM: Can you tell us about a project that has felt particularly rewarding?

SS: For several years, I've worked with a friend and colleague from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Beatrice Galilee, to create an organization to promote progressive design practices called The World Around. We shaped the strategy and identity for the organization and we collaborate to grow the program and influence of their work. In the studio, we are currently at work on many great projects: a retrospective exhibition for Prada in Shanghai, a user experience plan for Grand Palais that is currently under renovation in Paris, a new EV experience space in Atlanta, Georgia, for Hyundai, a catalog for artist Tavares Strachen, all fascinating. I'm interested in how design is both a research methodology and language to create experience and conversations around contemporary issues, to involve brands and individuals in a more beautiful, substantive and sustainable world.

MM: What are the three most important questions you ask a new client?
SS: Collaboration with clients is the absolute favorite part of my work. I ask the same questions you are ask here: What drives your work? How and why did you start? What future do you imagine and how can we advance that? And that is where we come in as designers. And we go from there.

MM: Where do you find your passion for design reflected in daily life outside of work?

SS: I am always looking at how other people give form to these same types of questions. What are people making and why? What types of ideas and conversations do design, art (and all types of visual expressions) inspire? I am always looking. I am very interested in exhibition as a form but I'm also interested in more public and informal ways we make and share creative expressions.

MM: Is there a designer / creative / artist who has been continually inspiring to you?

SS: I am interested in people like Lygia Pape and Agnes Denes, whose work is simultaneously personal and public, beautiful and critical, and speak and work on many levels, always integral to context. I am inspired by architects like Lina Bo Bardi: her exhibition but also her public spaces that are somehow bold and formalist but also intimate and domestic at the same time. And of course, there are Rae and Charles Eames. Really the model for our studio.

“Wheatfield – A Confrontation: Battery Park Landfill, Downtown Manhattan – With Artist in the field,” 1982. Photo by John McGrail

MM: How does Block Island feed your senses?

SS: I can't get enough of this place. The physical landscape feeds me -- the stunning beauty, the cycles of change and forces of nature, like the weather, that dominate and shape every aspect of life on the island are endlessly inspiring. The demands of the natural environment shift your perspective and priorities: you have to bend to other rhythms and incorporate other realities into your daily habits. It’s a necessary injection of nature, a critical contrast to my day to day life in New York City.